I was out for a week on vacation and went to Pittsburgh area to do some outdoor activities – white water rafting, obstacle course etc. It was fun. However my “Temple Hunting” (as my kids call it!) didnt stop!!!! The location where we did all these was very closer to http://www.svbf.org temple. Had a great darshan of Goddess Saradhamba and Jagadguru Adi Shankara. This is the only temple in US (I guess), where you can find sannidhi for Adi Shankara.

Couple of miles from this place is Arsha Vidhya Gurukulam (http://www.arshavidya.org/home.html), my most favorite place in US. If anyone needs peace, they should go here, spend 2 days. I wanted my wife and kids to see this place, understand what a serene environment, only Lord Dakshinamurthy temple in US, an atmosphere for vedantic studies, one of the finest religious book store and last but not the least – free food! Amazing place…..I must talk about this book store. This is almost like Giri traders. You name a religious book, they have it – so many books….If you’re in US, please visit this place – stay for a weekend and see whats going on there!

As usual, didnt know what to leave – wanted to bring the whole store home 🙂 Not that I would read all of them…I picked up some books Swami Dayanadha Saraswathi Swamigal etc…Also I noticed small – very small books on few topics like meditation, japa. Ok, coming to the main point, one of such small books is “Conversion is Violence”. This is the speech given by Swamiji 0n July 17, 1999 at TTK Hall on a seminar on “Violence to Hindu Heritage” conducted by Dharma Rakshana Sammelan, Chennai. This has just 16 pages. (http://www.jaia-bharati.org/anglais/swami-conviolence.htm) . Amazing lecture – everyone should read this. He brings in both dharama sashtra and basic common sense and vedanta to prove the point how evil this whole process is. How much of human rights violation is compromised in this process? How Hindus are being fooled on a daily basis??

Conversion is not something new…this has been going on for ages. So many of us have seen how this has impacted Hinduism. There are so many organizations that have been fighting to stop this. Sadly, power and money adds fuel to the problem. Mahaperiyava had talked a lot about how wrong this conversion is and during His days, He had talked to several political leaders about this as well. Following His footsteps, Pudhu Periyava has traveled to all corners of Tamilnadu and reached out to so many classes of people to create an awareness to stop this happening. In today’s world, I don’t know if any other religious leader  have done this and taken the heat that He took it. I am not saying this just because that I am a devotee of Kanchi Mutt. Protecting our value starts from the root-level problem and in my opinion, we are blessed to have these Pujya Gurus and last but not the least – Sri Subramanyam Swamy in fighting against this.

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